Why Do We Speculate Far Ahead? A Short History of Futures
Five waves of futures thinking, from oracles to complexity, and what the history says about who gets to imagine tomorrow.
Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash
We speculate far ahead because the consequences of present decisions outrun our ability to watch them. A pension system, a power station, a treaty, a curriculum and a childhood all commit resources into a period nobody in the room will be accountable for. There is no experiment available for any of them. Speculation is the only faculty that lets us inspect such a commitment before making it.
There is a second reason, and it is the more interesting one. The images a society holds of its own future shape what it does in the present. This was Fred Polak's argument in The Image of the Future: cultures carrying a vivid and positive image of what lies ahead tend to flourish, and cultures whose image of the future collapses tend to follow it down. On that reading, speculation is not a method for finding out what happens. It is one of the things that makes what happens.
Futures studies has been a formal discipline for roughly seventy years. The habit it formalised is very much older, and the best short account of that longer history is Wendy Schultz's "A Brief History of Futures", which divides the development of futures work into five waves. The waves below are hers. The people in them are the ones I would put there.
First wave: the oral tradition
Oracles, priests, shamans and augurs. Stars, entrails, charred bones, dice. The Pythia at Delphi ran for over a millennium.
The interesting thing about this period is not that these practitioners forecast badly. It is that they controlled the production of images of the future, on behalf of whoever was paying for them. That thread runs the whole way through.
Two things survive into the present. The Cassandra problem, where being right about a future outcome turns out to have almost no relationship to persuading anyone to act on it. And a name: the Delphi method, where the continuity is easy to overstate. Delphi was developed at RAND in the early 1950s by Olaf Helmer, Norman Dalkey and Nicholas Rescher, and it inverts oracular practice rather than continuing it. It is anonymous, iterative and statistically aggregated, designed to suppress exactly the authority effects that an oracle trades on. Its developers were uneasy about the name, because they thought it smacked a little of the occult. The inheritance is sociological, about who produces images of the future for whom, and not methodological.
Second wave: the early written age
Writing made two things possible: recording enough history to look for patterns in it, and describing a society that does not exist.
The pattern-seekers were the macrohistorians. Sima Qian (c. 145-86 BCE) traced cycles of virtue and decline across centuries in the Shiji. Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (1377) set out the cycle by which nomadic vigour becomes settled consolidation and then decadence, and it remains the most impressive piece of social forecasting produced before the modern period. Later entrants include Vico, Spengler, Toynbee and Sarkar. Galtung and Inayatullah's Macrohistory and Macrohistorians (1997) is the standard survey.
The other strand described the future as an ideal to aim at. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) gave the genre its name. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) imagined a society organised around research. Robert Boyle simply wrote a list of things science ought to achieve, which is a recognisable ancestor of the technology roadmap.
Third wave: enlightenment and extraction
Progress becomes the organising idea. Condorcet wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind in 1795, in hiding, shortly before his death. Comte built positivism around savoir pour prévoir, knowing in order to foresee.
Speculation also went popular. Jules Verne, William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890), H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and his 1902 Royal Institution lecture "The Discovery of the Future". Wells returned to it on BBC radio in November 1932 with a complaint that has aged well: there is not a single person anywhere making a whole-time job of estimating the consequences of new inventions, and there is not a single Professor of Foresight in the world. Méliès put a rocket in the moon's eye in 1902; Lang built Metropolis in 1927.
Then the state took an interest. The Soviet First Five-Year Plan (1928) and William Ogburn's Recent Social Trends in the United States (1933) are both attempts to steer a society by looking forward systematically.
"Extraction" sits in the name of this wave for a reason. The progress was powered by resources and colonies, and the invoice arrives in the wave that follows.
Fourth wave: systems and cybernetics
The field becomes a field.
Ossip Flechtheim coined "futurology" in 1943. Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics in 1948. Fred Polak's The Image of the Future appeared in Dutch in 1955 and in English in 1961, later abridged by Elise Boulding. Gaston Berger reintroduced la prospective in 1957, and Bertrand de Jouvenel followed with The Art of Conjecture and the Futuribles project.
At RAND and then the Hudson Institute, Herman Kahn brought scenario technique out of nuclear war planning and into civilian long-range forecasting. Kahn and Anthony Wiener's The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (Macmillan, 1967) is still worth reading for the move at its centre: an explicitly labelled "surprise-free projection" offered as a reference case, with canonical variations branching off it. Not a prediction, but a baseline to argue with. Their list of a hundred likely technical innovations is the part everyone quotes, and it scores about as well as you would expect.
The institutions arrive together. World Future Society (1966), the Club of Rome (1968), the World Futures Studies Federation (Paris, 1973). The Limits to Growth (1972) ran Jay Forrester's system dynamics model over global resource use, and the environmental reckoning of the previous wave lands here. At Shell, Pierre Wack, Ted Newland and Arie de Geus turn scenarios into corporate practice.
Fifth wave: complexity and emergence
The shift is from forecasting toward interpretation, and from technique toward the question of whose assumptions are being modelled.
Sohail Inayatullah's Causal Layered Analysis, set out as a method in Futures in 1998, is the emblematic tool: it reads a future at four levels, from the reported headline down to the myth underneath. Richard Slaughter and Joseph Voros develop integral futures. The centre of gravity spreads beyond Europe and North America, with Tamkang University and the Journal of Futures Studies becoming significant, and strong practice growing across Asia. Participation, games and experiential methods bring people who are not futurists into the work.
There are a lot of names in terms of bringing the field into the 21st Century. One is Ivana Milojević, who helped bring feminist and narrative foresight into the centre of the field. Riel Miller, through UNESCO, reframed the whole activity around futures literacy, which moved the goal from producing a good forecast to building a capability people carry with them afterwards. That shift is still working its way through practice.
What the history is actually about
Read as a sequence of methods, this is a story of steady improvement, and that reading is both dull and probably false.
Read Schultz's way, it is a story about a single question that never goes away: who gets to produce images of the future, and for whom? Oracles produced them for kings. Enlightenment writers produced them for a reading public. RAND and Hudson produced them for governments and defence contractors. Shell produced them for a board. The fifth wave's claim is that the production has widened considerably.
Whether it has widened as far as the field likes to believe is a fair question, and a useful one to hold onto. Most organisational futures work is still commissioned by senior people and delivered to senior people. The democratising instinct of the fifth wave is real, and it is not finished.
Where it might go next: The sixth wave
The WFSF turned fifty in 2023. Futures literacy has institutionalised through UNESCO, and World Futures Day has been observed each December since 2022. Tamás Kristóf's 2024 review in the European Journal of Futures Research puts the forward agenda on artificial general intelligence, sustainability transitions, collapse, energy futures and decolonised practice. I would sign most of that.
Nobody has named a sixth wave, and I would be wary of anyone who does too quickly. What looks like a real open question is what generative AI does to a field whose core activity is producing images of the future. When the marginal cost of a plausible-sounding scenario falls to nearly nothing, the scarce thing becomes judgement about which images are worth taking seriously, and who is accountable for them. Which returns us to the first wave's question rather than escaping it.
Will the field return to something it has already been, or is a new paradigm coming? That is an open question. What the five waves make clear is that the underlying habit is not going anywhere, because it is not really optional. As Eleonora Masini put it, quoted by Schultz: people become human the moment they think about the future, the moment they try to plan for the future.
Originally published in 2023 and revised in September 2026.
Sources
Wendy L. Schultz, "A Brief History of Futures", World Futures Review 7(4): 324-331 (2015)
Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, Macmillan (1967)
Fred Polak, The Image of the Future, Sythoff/Oceana (1961); abridged translation by Elise Boulding (1973)
Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah (eds.), Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, Praeger (1997)
Sohail Inayatullah, "Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method", Futures 30(8): 815-829 (1998)
Riel Miller (ed.), Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century, UNESCO and Routledge (2018)
Tamás Kristóf, "Development tendencies and turning points of futures studies", European Journal of Futures Research 12(1) (2024)
H. G. Wells, "Wanted: Professors of Foresight", BBC radio broadcast, 19 November 1932, reprinted in Richard Slaughter (ed.), Studying the Future (1989)
Frequently asked questions
What are the five waves of futures? A periodisation of futures thinking proposed by Wendy Schultz: the oral tradition, the early written age, enlightenment and extraction, systems and cybernetics, and complexity and emergence. It runs from oracles and augury through to participatory and interpretive practice.
When did futures studies become a formal discipline? In the decades after the Second World War. Ossip Flechtheim coined "futurology" in 1943, Gaston Berger reintroduced la prospective in 1957, and the institutions followed: the World Future Society in 1966, the Club of Rome in 1968 and the World Futures Studies Federation in 1973. In business, Shell popularised it with their scenario planning processes in the 1970’s.
Is the Delphi method related to the Delphic oracle? Only by name, and the name was a joke its developers came to regret. Delphi was built at RAND in the early 1950s by Olaf Helmer, Norman Dalkey and Nicholas Rescher, and its anonymous, iterative, aggregated structure is designed to suppress the authority effects that oracles depend on.
What is the Cassandra problem in foresight? The gap between being right about a future outcome and persuading anyone to act on it. Accuracy and influence turn out to be almost unrelated, which is why so much foresight practice is concerned with how findings are communicated and owned.
Why do organisations speculate about the long term? Because their commitments outlast their ability to observe the consequences, and no experiment is available. Speculation is the only way to inspect a long-range decision before making it. There is also Polak's argument that the image an organisation holds of its future shapes what it does now.
Is there a sixth wave of futures? Nobody has convincingly proposed one. The phrase usually refers to the sixth Kondratieff long wave, which is an unrelated framework. The most likely candidate for a genuine break is what generative AI does to a field whose central activity is producing images of the future.
Packaging and pitching foresight to clients and colleagues
Why do good foresight proposals still get turned down?
Selling foresight is the work of translating futures thinking into something a client or a leadership team can recognise, budget for and act on. Foresight is more in demand than ever across strategy, innovation, policy and design, but even future-shaping ideas fall flat when they are positioned poorly. This masterclass deals with the positioning, packaging and pitching that sits around the method.
In this practical masterclass, foresight experts Mathias Behn Bjørnhof (ANTICIPATE) and Chloé de Ruffray share the strategies they use to position, package and pitch foresight services, whether you work independently or inside an organisation. They talk openly about what has worked for them and about what has fallen over. You also get the Irresistible Foresight Canvas, the one-page tool we use to shape an offer before it goes anywhere near a client.
What you will learn
✺ How to position foresight so it answers a decision your client or leadership already cares about
✺ How to package foresight into scopes, formats and price points that people can say yes to
✺ How to use the Irresistible Foresight Canvas to shape an offer before you pitch it
✺ How to meet the objections that come up most often, from "we already do strategy" to "show me the return"
Methods and tools covered
✓ Positioning - framing foresight around the client's problem
✓ Packaging - turning a practice into offers people can buy
✓ Pitching and pricing - proposals, first meetings, and what to charge
✓ The Irresistible Foresight Canvas - a one-page tool for building an offer clients say yes to
Who it is for
Independent foresight practitioners, consultants, in-house strategists and innovation leads, and anyone who has to make the case for futures work inside an organisation.
What you receive
Your purchase is a downloadable zip file containing:
✓ The full session video replay
✓ The Irresistible Foresight Canvas
✓ Slides and workbook
✓ Full transcript
Buying for a team or through your company?
If you would like several seats, an invoice, or a purchase made through your organisation rather than by card, fill in our contact form and we will arrange it. We also run this masterclass as a live, tailored session for teams.
By purchasing this digital product, you confirm that you agree to the following statement: "I agree that delivery begins immediately upon payment, and I understand and accept that my 14-day right of withdrawal expires once delivery has begun.” (see Return Policy for more information)
VAT (25%) is applied according to the EU place of supply rules for digital services. Danish VAT number: DK45996689
